Postmodernism Killed the Avant-Garde?

Reed’s death has hit my generation because his presence anchored us into a time and a place when the avant garde was still meaningful. He was a touchstone of what it means to be modern, a significant and uncompromising artist whose works challenge social and artistic values. The Velvet Underground could have been formed at any time since 1966. They still sound utterly new. His death made us remember the music that made us want to leave our small towns and our small lives, a time when transgression was not simply a marketing technique.

He did not need to explain himself in interviews, the work is there, already divided into the listenable/hits and the unlistenable/difficult. But here was a man whose cultural value far exceeded his commercial value. There is not much of this any more. Marketing is now part of what artists do. They “play” with the market; their lifestyles and rebellions key into the corporate world. Art about art, art about money and value is now familiar. It was easy enough to walk around Damien Hirst’s big retrospective and see precisely the point at which the money becomes both subject and object.

* * *

Lou Reed was avant garde precisely because he came out of modernism, because he changes for ever how things look and how they sound. A lodestar. His loss resonates because we can vaguely recall a time when not everything had been subsumed by the market.

I get what Moore is driving at, and maybe art is more commercial now than it was in the past. It certainly seems that way. But as I said in Prufrock this morning:

The music of Reed aside, this has all been said before. Part of the problem is that the term “avant-garde” doesn’t mean anything anymore (nor did it mean much fifty years ago). It is used to refer to any work that is “innovative” or “shocking” in which the artist has (or affects) a certain art-for-art’s-sake attitude.

Also so-called “avant-garde” art was about money before Reed was even born, which is not to say that it wasn’t about art, too! In fact, it seems to me that the whole paradigm of pure art as opposed to impure art with the motive to make money as the invisible defining line is rather useless.

Let me also add that the term “postmodernism” is mostly useless, too. Jean-François Lyotard defined it as an attack on “metanarratives.” Frederic Jameson called it an “aesthetic populism.” And Jürgen Habermas suggested that it was anti-modern–opposed to “objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art, according to their inner logic.”

Of course, views regarding truth and morality have changed (though maybe not as uniformly as we might think), and terms like “postmodernism” can be a helpful short-hand sometimes, but as a term to categorize works of art, postmodernism is often unhelpful, even misleading.

It doesn’t work at all for Rock music. Nor does it work for literature. In American poetry, for example, it is often used to refer to works created mostly after WWII. So Wallace Stevens was modern, not postmodern? Really? He held tightly to “metanarratives,” “universal morality” and had no touch of populism in his work, even in poems like “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”? What about Lorine Niedecker? Or Whitman and Dickinson for that matter? I don’t see a lot of dogmatic “metanarrative” in Dickinson, nor do I see much anti-populism in Whitman. Then, of course, there are all those poets who wrote (and are writing) after WWII whose work is in no way “postmodern.”

So let’s stop with the “avant-garde” this, “postmodern” that, “post-avant” this or “post-postmodern” that. I have never gotten into Lou Reed. He was of another generation. But I can appreciate that he was a smart, interesting musician who managed to get at something of what it means to be human in his music. Let’s start with that.

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16 Responses to Postmodernism Killed the Avant-Garde?

In reading threads on Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones in the last couple of days, I’m still completely baffled as to how conservatives can enjoy rock music, which is all about transgression and rebellion.

I get why a certain sort of working-class, right-wing populist like Ted Nugent can play it or listen to it: because it’s (or can be)violent and aggressive and the blue-blooded old fogies hate it (or used to hate it).

But I still don’t get how real trad conservatives like AmCon writers, or Morning Joe, can appreciate the human values in the music of Lou Reed or the Stones but then be against the liberal/anarchic/individualistic culture that they are poster-children of.

“There are no rules.
However, principles may be discerned in actual practice: for example, in the way people actually speak, or in the lines poets have written. If a good line contradicts a principle one has formulated, then the principle, by which I mean a kind of working idea, should be discarded or amended.”

—Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry, Page 7

Try replacing the words “rules” and “principles” in this quotation with the word “labels.” Theories are labels; they should be discarded the moment they are no longer useful.

In rock and roll the old paradigm is about getting famous and selling out. That’s something Lou Reed never did. This is quite an accomplishment, as the Clash reminds us…

Now every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the World
And ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl
Love ‘n’ hate tattooed across the knuckles of his hands
Hands that slap his kids around ’cause they don’t understand how

Death or glory becomes just another story
Death or glory becomes just another story

‘N’ every gimmick hungry yob digging gold from rock ‘n’ roll
Grabs the mike to tell us he’ll die before he’s sold

I agree heartily with the need to minimize the use of terms like avant-garde and postmodern in assessments of artistic work. I’ll also add the label “generation” as you use it here. You don’t like Reed because he’s of another generation? Like the Beatles, Stones, Louis Armstrong, and Bach? Why not just describe what doesn’t float your boat aesthetically, etc., rather than just say you dig folks your own age?

Um, granted, the final couple of lines are a bit ambiguous, but I didn’t say I disliked him and *merely because* he was of another generation. Just quickly suggesting that my lack of interest in him is partly due to my lack of exposure at an age when one is particularly interested in Rock and tends to form an affinity for certain bands that can’t always be reproduced later in life.

And lest this final phrase be scrutinized for nefarious aesthetic crimes, let me add that always doesn’t mean never, NOR does it mean musical taste is always (or even regularly?) developed via circumstances. I do like CREAM after all.

But I do hate Bob Dylan’s music. And I hate it–just so we’re clear–for absolutely no other reason than everyone seems to love it so much.:-)

Egypt Steve –
Some of us (many of us, I hope) like music or not based purely on the way it sounds. It either resonates within you or it does not. Lyrical content is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned – I listen to vocals as another instrument in the mix.

Interesting story: Jagger and Richards used to do ‘vowel mapping” for their songs, understanding that some vowel sequences or juxtapositions sound better than others.

As for post-modernism: I can tell you based on my wife’s experience in getting her degree that it has become an entrenched dogma. Nothing new will ever come out of it.

I’m with Micah Mattix on Dylan, except that I just can’t stand the way he sounds.

I’m a fan of the admittedly obscure genre of folk metal (which is what the name implies: a hybridization of some of the harder metal genres with various mostly European folk music elements). I much prefer those bands whose lyrics are not in English (because the lyrics tend to be weak in whichever language), and I have found that folk metal lyrics in languages which have vowel harmony (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Kazakh are the ones that I have heard) work much better as sonic landscapes.

But I still don’t get how real trad conservatives like AmCon writers, or Morning Joe, can appreciate the human values in the music of Lou Reed or the Stones but then be against the liberal/anarchic/individualistic culture that they are poster-children of.

Help! I need somebody here!

Cultural conservative in a large measure is about beauty, a true one. In rock music there is a lot of what is truly beautiful. I will separate especially Progressive (Art) Rock and jazz-fusion. Beautiful art is beautiful on its own terms. King Crimson stands on its own as art, the same goes to Frank Zappa, who happened to define himself as generally conservative. It is all grey zone. After all, “The Beauty will save the world” quote belongs to a conservative writer, Dostoevsky.

I still don’t get how real trad conservatives like AmCon writers, or Morning Joe, can appreciate the human values in the music of Lou Reed or the Stones but then be against the liberal/anarchic/individualistic culture that they are poster-children of.

What Stones songs are humanistic? I don’t hear a celebration of individualism and decadence in Reed’s work. Or at least that’s not what I like about it. I hear tenderness towards and acceptance of people who are judged and shunned elsewhere. (I’m not a trad conservative either).

Although it’s useless to attach ironclad labels to rock music, perhaps, generally, we can say there was a classic period, 1955-1975, when the formal qualities were established, followed by a modernist rebellion of London & New York punks against the status quo.

The musical tropes of the punk modernists were subversion of form and disdain for the classical ethos that defined the Rock Star or God.

Lou Reed bridged the gap between the genres, creating, perhaps, something akin to postmodernism, although I’d hesitate to chart those unknown waters.

Suffice to say that popular music today finds itself in a truly appalling state…

Thanks for Prufrock. I’m not sure I completely agree…maybe the idea that there is no truth or that one makes up ones own truth has filtered it’s way into all art forms including music. But this may or may not make it post modern (I’m only a salesman) but I do think such ideas make for bad art. But people are aching for meaning/truth I think. Good art reflects something of the truth. “All I got is this red guitar, three chords and the truth” to quote your least favorite song writer.

But when I think of the term Post Modern I do think of mostly of paintings and or sculptures or performance art. You posted on Prufrock an article about Picasso and all I could think of was the lyrics by the Kinks/Ray Davies “You keep all your smart modern writers, give me William Shakespeare. You keep all you smart modern painters I’ll take Rembrandt, Titian and Gene Gainsborough”. I feel the same way about Picasso as you do about Dylan…but worse maybe because I just don’t like him or his art. Perhaps I’m a Daviesist.

@Andrew
Agreed about Arkona, based only on the “Goi, Rode, Goi!” album (the only one I have), though if I could only pick one Slavic folk metal band it would be Fferyllt (who are from the Krasnodar area and whose main songwriter is heavily influenced by Celtic music and paganism). The best single example I can think of for how vowel harmony from Uralic or Turkic language plays in the folk metal genre is Dalriada, a Hungarian band who as it turns out toured with Arkona last year.

The best single example I can think of for how vowel harmony from Uralic or Turkic language plays in the folk metal genre is Dalriada, a Hungarian band who as it turns out toured with Arkona last year.

Speaking of the devil, a cult Hungarian band, legendary Omega, while having most of its albums doubled in English, became a legends (in Russia) specifically while singing in Hungarian. In fact, overwhelming majority of Russian fans (yours truly included), and we are talking many millions, prefer to listen Omega only in Hungarian. All my Omega collection is strictly Hungarian language.

Vowel mapping: new concept for me as a songwriter. I’ll have to try that. I think that may be just a variation on the general idea of prosody, ie, fitting hour lyrics to your tune.

I used to think the “avant garde” was meaningful way back when-a that is, in the ’90s. By then it was “alternative culture” or some such. I learned early on to scorn Commodified Cool(TM) yet i set out on a project — okay, mostly an idle dream– of creating a Christian Underground movement. (Even thought of t-shirts showing saints praying in the catacombs, captioned: “The Underground Scene.” but I figured, how would people know it was in the catacombs?)

But then I hit 30 or so, and just stopped caring about being alterna … garde, or what have you. Undoubtedly, the aftermath of 9/11 had something to do with it. The cultural space of the avant-garde shifted to the political. It was the antiwar movement, and the questioning-the-official-9/11 conspiracy theory movement. We suddenly had much, much bigger fish to fry. And yes, art has been a big part of the culture of political resistance. But not Art for Art’s sake; not for the sake of blindly flailing away at traditional mores; Art for the sake of Liberty and Justice.

But also, there’s the fact I suspect it is something you just grow out of. You may continue being creative and artistic and exploring new things and expressing your faith in new ways, perhaps. But you have nothing else to prove. you’ve satisfied the (hormonally driven?) drive to distinguish yourself, yet belong to a family. You stop caring self-consciously about whether you’re in with the (“outsider”) In Crowd, and then it loses much of its power. Speaking for myself at least.

Amd undoubtedly, the Internet has played a huge role in killing off the notion of underground or avant-garde. You can’t hide anything any more.

“But I still don’t get how real trad conservatives like AmCon writers, or Morning Joe, can appreciate the human values in the music of Lou Reed or the Stones but then be against the liberal/anarchic/individualistic culture that they are poster-children of.”

A seemingly mild observation that I think cuts to the fundamental heart of lots of things.

To me—a moderate libertarian just in case that disclosure is important in any way—the answer is because “trad conservatives” (and conservatives *generally* as well) have become, to an very large and regretable degree, more reactionary than anything.

And the reason they aren’t in reaction to rock and roll in toto is because classical music has such a limited appeal, obviously all of rock and roll isn’t liberal/anarchic, and there’s so many genres of it now that everyone likes some of it.

But otherwise, how do you explain conservatives who were anti-World War I and then WWII even applauding Nixon’s adoption of the Vietnam War for “conservatism”? (About the stupidest thing possible.) And now their lust for Mideast and indeed a global war. (Against “terrorism.”) And then supposed “conservatives” concerned about governmental power just loving the Patriot Act and etc.

One good thing is that one can discern a certain conservative reaction against this mere reactionism perhaps nowhere better than with the Am Con magazine itself. Trying to get back, that is, to formulating conservative positions out of genuine principle rather than mere reactionism.

What’s disheartening to me a bit however is what I perceive to be elements of this … “doubled” reactionism as just *being* reactionary. That is, where this “reaction against conservative reactionism” seems to exist merely in reaction to *whatever* the Republicans are doing.

Go look, for example, at the current comment from Mr. Deneen in the general Am Con blog that impliedly is whacking Republicans for insufficient “compassion.” Arguing expressly even at one point in the clear direction of saying that we ought not distinguish between those who are poor due to bad luck, and those who are simply lazy.

Or go look at what I regard as the terrible lack of concern here about the Democrats’ immigration wishes. Or what I regard as the excessive solicitude some of the writers here show towards things like affirmative action, promiscuous cries of racism (e.g., the Trayvon Martin matter), those people who don’t want to talk about crime and etc. and so forth.

Obviously I like reacting against reactionism, but I think it doesn’t make sense to do so merely to satisfy your own reactionism.